


Once in a Lifetime

by My_Barbaric_Yawp



Series: You May Find Yourself... [2]
Category: Spirited
Genre: F/M, Family Feels, Fix-It, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-18
Updated: 2020-06-18
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:55:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24781165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/My_Barbaric_Yawp/pseuds/My_Barbaric_Yawp
Summary: For Henry, it turns out that after life, there’s just more life. And it’s a far cry from the rock ‘n’ roll life that he’s used to.
Relationships: Suzy Darling/Henry Mallet
Series: You May Find Yourself... [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1792345
Comments: 4
Kudos: 9





	Once in a Lifetime

_“And you may find yourself in a beautiful house_  
_With a beautiful wife_  
_And you may ask yourself, well_  
_How did I get here?”_

_~_ Talking Heads

***

When the time comes, the first name is easy, yeah? Mackenzie, after his mum. No big deal, right, just a little something to remember the old tartar by. It's a beautiful name for a beautiful little girl whose first little wail in the world makes his cold, dead heart start up its beat again.

It's the last name that's a stumper. It's awfully tempting to give her the last name Mallet—to finally pass on his name to at least one of his kids—but there's a whole host of problems with that as well.

“You’re dead, Henry,” Suze reminds him, looking exhausted but cozy all cuddled up on her side in the hospital bed with baby Mackenzie snuggled into the space between them.

“I’m not,” he says, stroking her hip and giving her bum a little squeeze just as a reminder.

“No,” Suze says, rolling her eyes but not bothering to swat his hand. “I just gave birth to our daughter, you maniac.”

“Yeah,” he says, leaning in to kiss her—gently, right. She just had a baby, after all. But he’s only been able to do this whenever he wants for about seven months, and it never gets old.

“See,” he says after a while, “not dead.”

“Mmmm.” Suze hums, eyes closed like she’s about to doze. “The government still thinks you are, though. Do you want to explain to them about baby Mallet, too?”

He doesn’t. He really doesn’t. He didn’t care much for the plod when he was alive the first time. He’ll be fucked if he has to explain his daughter to them now.

Suzy’s asleep before they reach an agreement, and the name that ends up on the birth certificate is Darling.

***

“Mackenzie fucking Darling!” he shouts when they get back to the house. He’s holding the baby carrier and the diaper bag, and dear Christ, do babies come with a lot of kit now. He’s trying to remember if Charlotte had any of this nonsense when Apollo was born, and then he remembers that lack of preparation on that account hadn’t exactly turned out well.

Suze just sighs and heads for the kitchen, still walking gingerly because, you know, childbirth, but Henry’s still stuck on the name.

“It’s Steve’s name,” he yells after her, shedding the diaper bag and following with the baby. And yes, he knows it’s old fashioned, but he never claimed to be an enlightened sod, now did he. He sets Mackenzie on the kitchen counter and strokes her fat little baby cheek. His baby girl is not going to be known by another bloke’s last name.

“It’s my name,” Suzy says, slamming a full kettle of water on the hob. “It’s the kids’ name. Don’t you want our daughter to feel like family with her brother and sister?”

“Oh—now—” She has a point, and he’s blustering now. He doesn’t really have a good counter argument for that.

“Besides, you like the name Darling,” she says, turning to him with her coy, little gotcha-smile. “You like being able to call me darling knowing you mean it both ways—it’s a little joke for you. Remember when I wanted to change my name after the divorce? You almost threw a fit.”

“Your maiden name is Payne,” he says, watching her prowl towards him now with that smirk that drives him wild. It’s a good thing Mackenzie is asleep. “What kind of a sadist wants his missus to be called Payne?”

“I wasn’t even your missus then,” she reminds him, finally reaching him and reaching up to pull his head down to hers.

“Yeah, you were” he says, sliding his hands around her waist. She’s soft and warm and everything he’s ever wanted, last name and all. “You’ve always been my missus, Suze. I’m pretty sure you're the whole reason I even exist.”

“Do you want me to change my name to Mallet, then? Be your missus in name, too?”

She’s staring up at him with wide, searching eyes, and Henry’s not even sure if she means it. But it doesn’t matter. He knows his answer.

“Nah,” he says, leaning down for a kiss. “You’ll always be my darling, Darling.”

And when kettle whistles a minute later and wakes up Mackenzie, who joins in with her own wail, he realizes that like it or not, she’ll always be his Darling, too.

***

There are some things Henry forgot about being alive. Quite a few actually. Like sleep deprivation and needing the loo and showering—which is the greatest invention known to man and damn near killed him all over again when he forgot how fucking slippery it could get.

One month into his second—or fourth, depending on how you looked at it—attempt at fatherhood, Henry looks in the mirror and barely recognizes the man who looks back. He has a beard, of all things. An honest to god, scruffy beard. Something about having a newborn who can't sleep sent learning how to shave again right to the bottom of his daily list.

And there are Lists. He’s sharing a baby with Suzy Darling—you better believe there are Lists. Capital “L” Lists. There’s a List for the morning feed and the afternoon nap and every blessed moment in between. There’s cuddle time—which is amazing—and enrichment time—which is fucking insane—and nappy time, which Henry is becoming a real master at, since Suzy always seems to be conveniently missing whenever Mackenzie needs a change.

All of which means that the smooth punk rocker aesthetic he’s been carrying off effortlessly for years in death has abruptly vanished in this new stab at life. He’s never thought about the amount of time he must have put into his appearance the last go around, but the absence of that time is evident all over his face. He stares into the mirror at a haggard looking man with a beard, no eye-liner, and a stained, ill-fitting black t-shirt that even Joey Ramone would turn his nose up at.

He has Jonquil to thank for that. They’d been so busy getting ready for the baby, neither he nor Suze had thought to get a new wardrobe for a ghost who might be coming back to life as well. It’d taken a few days for them to remember that Henry couldn’t wear the same outfit every day in real life, and Jonquil had been deputized to pick up some basics until he and Suze had time to think about something other than Mackenzie.

The baby’s asleep, now, thank fuck, and Henry suddenly aches for his old face. He’s got no shaving gear though, but he’s got a phone—Suze insisted—so he thumbs through the numbers and considers his options.

There’s Zach, of course. His biggest fan. Zach would do just about anything for him, and that’s a bit of a problem, because Henry’s gotten kind of used to being invisible and free of his fame, and when he’s with Zach he sometimes feels like he’s a bug under a magnifying glass. A creature that Zach wants to study and catalog. One completely unchanged in the intervening years. The rockstar in his natural habitat. A man out of time.

It’s fine, most of the time, and Zach means well, but it’s hard to think of him as a mate. Someone Henry can just relax with and be himself—whatever self he turns out to be in this life, anyway.

So that leaves Steve. The knobhead. Only he’s been much less of a knobhead since he married Jenny. Something about marrying a witch could do that to a man. He’d been great actually, when Mackenzie was born—taking Elvis and Verity for the month without being asked to give them all a chance to get settled in. The kids had come back excited to get to know their baby sister and get back to normal—well as normal as the Darlings ever got. Steve hadn’t been a dick about it at all.

So Henry looks once more at his beard—it’s getting pretty wild in there—and his hair—which doesn’t even bear mentioning—and he dials Steve.

“It’s Henry,” he says, “where do you go in this fucking city for a haircut and a shave?”

“Oh, thank Christ,” Steve says. “I thought you’d never ask.”

***

Hanging out with Steve is not as bad as he might have guessed. They go to the barber, where Henry tries to pull up a photo of himself on tour in the 80s to explain the cut, only to have Steve snatch the phone out of his hands.

“You’re dead, remember?” he whispers. “Let’s not freak George out. George is the best barber in town.”

This last he directs to a jolly looking old man with a curling mustache and twinkle in his eye, and Henry surrenders immediately on the basis that whatever happens, it can’t be worse than the shapeless mop he’s currently sporting on his head.

“Think of a bloke who’s just been electrocuted, and now he looks Cool,” Steve tells George, and Henry shuts his eyes and for the first time in years, considers a prayer.

Maybe it’s the thought that counts, because by some actual miracle when George taps his shoulder and he opens his eyes, his own face stares back at him in the floor length mirror.

“Fuck,” he says, “I missed my face.”

“Yeah,” Steve says. “Cheekbones for days. You’ve done masterful work, George. Let’s schedule a follow up for one month. Oh, and can we get a shaving kit? Electric, yeah. He’s got a baby at home. A straightedge would make Suzy freak.”

They leave George’s with the supplies necessary to keep Henry’s goatee in shape, and without being prompted, Steve directs the car towards the mall.

“Clothes?” Henry asks.

“Clothes,” Steve agrees. “Those sweatpants are an insult to mankind. Just promise me one thing?”

“Yeah?”

“Just don’t buy all of Hot Topic, okay? Suzy would kill us.”

***

It’s tempting, Henry will give him that, but he takes one look at the baby Goth stocking vials of fake blood behind the counter, and he runs in the other direction.

“They’ve made it all corporate bollocks,” he tells Steve, utterly disgusted, and Steve shrugs.

“Lot of money to be made in weirdos,” Steve agrees, and Henry is suddenly glad he was dead for that particular triumph of capitalism in the last thirty years.

“I just want good clothes,” Henry says, and it feels like a whine. “You know, jeans that fit. A snazzy jacket or two. Something I can move in and mind a baby and still feel like me.”

“Gotcha,” Steve says, and then they get to work.

It takes a while and in the end they have to custom order the jackets—which is easy because Henry knows what he likes, and he remembers the grey number from spiriting with a lot of fondness, and he knows Suzy will, too. At the end of the afternoon they have bags of stuff for a new life—tight jeans and t-shirts, a few button downs and waistcoats, a slip to pick up the jackets when they’re ready, and a massive pack of black socks so Suzy can stop complaining about his bare feet in his old boots. They got a new pair of boots, too, and some pyjama pants, and when Steve had coughed and asked about underwear, Henry had smirked and told him to mind his own business.

Everyone knows punk rockers go commando, anyway.

So they pile all of this into the car, and Henry takes a twirl in the parking lot as a new man—fresh hair, fresh shave, new jeans, and a skintight t-shirt and waistcoat combo that makes him feel like a god, and then he looks at Steve with a grin and without thinking twice, asks “Pint?”

“Yes,” Steve says, fervently. “Please.”

***

Steve isn’t exactly the man Henry would pick to become his best mate, but it happens anyway. For all that Steve is a total wanker, he’s a total wanker that cares about Suze and the kids and one of about seven people in the world who know where the newly living Henry Mallet came from.

It’s enough.

Enough to be getting on with. Enough to get a cheeky pint together after long days spent minding Mackenzie when Suze goes back to work. Henry can’t haunt her now, and someone needs to take care of the baby, so Henry finds himself serving as a house husband and stay-at-home dad most of the time.

“It’s all beginning to feel a bit late-Lennon, you know?” he says to Steve down the pub one night when Suzy had come home to find him cradling a wailing Mackenzie in one arm and making a decent start on the washing up with the other and abruptly sent him out.

“You’re doing amazing,” she’d said. “I love you so much. Now, please go get drunk.”

“I think she’s worried,” he tells Steve. “That I’m going to wake up or something and remember I’m a rockstar and fuck right off.”

Steve nods, watching the football on the telly, like a good mate. If he made eye contact at all Henry wouldn’t be able to talk. It was funny how you could go your whole life and most of your death railing against the establishment and societal norms, and then find yourself talking truth to a mate, and need to cling to them all the more.

“Are you going to fuck off?” Steve asks. It’s not antagonistic—although of course it could be. In many ways, if Henry fucks off, Steve will be left holding the bag.

“Lennon didn’t.”

Steve does look at him then with a little frown.

“Lennon was shot.”

“Oh right,” Henry says, smiling into his pint. He wonders if the ghost of John Lennon still haunts his family. Could explain a lot about Yoko, actually, come to think.

“Did you know him?” Steve asks.

“Not really. He was good and retired when I came on the scene. Met George though. He and Idle threw these mad parties—truly insane.”

“Idle? Eric Idle, the Python?”

“Yeah,” Henry says with a snort. “Barmy bastards, the whole lot.”

“Jesus,” says Steve, looking around at the dingy old pub that might as well have a tumbleweed blowing through it, it’s that dead. “Are you sure you don’t want to fuck off?”

Henry knows what Steve means. When you’ve partied with rock ‘n’ roll royalty, why would you give it up to live the suburban nightmare on the outskirts of Sydney?

Except it’s not a nightmare to Henry. The King? That guy was a fucking nightmare. Finding himself in a world where Suzy never knew him? That was a nightmare. And loving Suzy Darling for years, and not being able to touch her every day? That was an actual, living nightmare. So a baby and step-kids and a house and a woman who makes him lists even while she’s warming his bed?

Not a nightmare. Not even close.

It’s a life. And for the first time in a very long time, Henry actually wants to live it.

“I’m not going to fuck off,” he says, watching Man U score another stupid fucking goal. “I’ve lived that life already, and it killed me. Proper dead. I won’t get another chance, yeah? I gotta make this one count. To be the man Suze and our kids need.”

Steve lets out a whistle and punches Henry’s shoulder hard. It hurts, and Henry doesn’t care, not when Steve waves the bartender over.

“Whiskey,” he says. “We’re going to need a lot of whiskey for my absolutely whipped friend.”

***

The sentiment is insulting, but the whiskey is divine. Henry sips quite a bit and is generally pleased when his tolerance holds most of the night. A band starts playing in the bar when it gets later, and Henry will allow that the guitarist isn’t complete shit. It gives him an idea though. Not every moment of his time at home has been spent on Mackenzie’s care. He’s had time to muck about a bit with Elvis’s guitar and come up with a few new tunes. It’d be nice to perform again, in a low key way.

He asks the bartender how to get that started, and the bartender turns out to be the owner, who invites him to come to their weekly open mic night.

“Who knows,” the publican says, “if you’re any good, I might have a spot in the weekly schedule opening up.”

“All right,” Henry says with a grin. He remembers his first break like this. The half-hearted nod from the venue. The trial by fire. The lack of pay. It was fun, then, doing it for free. It meant something. It meant that you couldn’t give up. It meant that the music was all that mattered.

 _Except it’s not_ , Henry thinks when he gets home and walks through the door to find Suzy up with the baby, pacing the halls, the two of them crying and unable to stop. He takes one look at their red little faces and rushes in to scoop up Mackenzie and take Suzy into his arms.

“What’s happened here, then?” he asks. “I was only gone for a few hours.”

“I know,” Suze says, sniffling into his collar while he strokes her hair. “I know.”

“You told me to go get drunk.”

“I did,” she says, still clinging to him tight. “I know I did.”

“Okay,” he says, whispering to both of his girls. “It’s okay, Darling. I’m here.”

Later, when Mackenzie is mercifully asleep, and Suzy is tucked into bed beside him, he just keeps crooning in her ear, something new and soft and lovely. Something just for her. And he thinks to himself that what a young Henry Mallet didn’t know about the world was a fucking lot.

***

The next morning is better. Both of his girls are all smiles, and it warms him up inside. There wasn’t a lot of warmth in his last life, as far as he can remember. Fancy jackets with gold accents were great to look at and not much use in Manchester in February. Factor in all the cocaine, and it’s a mystery that he’s alive, or, well, less dead than he was.

But exposure to the elements aside, Henry’s prevailing memory of his last life is an overwhelming sense of emptiness. Of darkness. Of emotional and spiritual chill. Like his soul was frostbit somewhere in another life, and in his first go at this one, it had sought out anything and everything to numb the pain.

In many ways, dying was the best thing to ever happen to him.

He makes pancakes that morning. It’s a newly acquired skill, and Suzy seems very impressed when Verity scarfs down six without a complaint and even Elvis stumbles in halfway through, drawn from his teenage slumber by the scent of pancakes, butter, and jam on the air.

 _It’s all very happy families_ , Henry thinks, when they’re all budged up in the breakfast nook while Suzy nurses Mackenzie, and the kids fight over the last pancake, and he smells his coffee and reads the front page of paper, just for old times’ sake. 

It’s perfection.

***

He does go back for the open mic night, in the end. Jonquil takes the baby, and he begs the acoustic guitar off Elvis and takes Suze to the pub for a drink and a chat and a bit of a cuddle in the corner while the performances start. There’s one girl with pipes like Nina Simone, and he could listen to her all night.

“She’s incredible,” Suzy says at the end of the set.

“I’d hate to be the poor bastard to follow her,” he agrees, just as the owner calls his name—just the first one, of course. Can’t have anyone asking questions about Henry Mallet. Suzy spots his wince and gives him a smile and a kiss, for luck. He takes Elvis’s guitar to the little area set up with a stool and a mic, and he gets himself settled in for the set.

It’s funny how it all comes back to him—performing, that is. Obviously it’s acoustic tonight. And it will be, most likely, for the rest of his career, such as it is. He has to steer clear of all of his popular stuff from before. Zach may be contained, but other Henry Mallet fanatics might pop out of the woodwork at any moment, and performing his old music would probably be pushing the patience of the universe just a mite too far.

So he opens with a new song. A lullaby for Mackenzie. One he’s also sung for Verity, when she lets him. It’s slow and sweet and when he looks up he can see tears in Suze’s eyes, and it feels right. It feels like he’s finally home.

“This next one’s for the lady who brought me back from the dead,” he says, and everyone says “Aw,” but Suzy bursts out laughing and that, he decides, is worth just about everything.

***

“I’m changing my name,” Steve says one night, six months later, out of the blue.

“You what?” Henry is waiting for his slot. Cynthia’s working her Nina Simone magic again, and he’s barely paying attention to Steve, who’d tagged along for a pint and chance to get out from under Jenny’s feet.

“Darling,” Steve says, “I’m going to change it.”

That gets Henry’s attention, and he looks at his unlikely best mate with a raised eyebrow.

“All right,” Henry says, “I’ll bite. What are you going to change it to?”

“Hawthorne,” Steve says, blushing faintly, and isn’t that just fascinating.

“Why does that ring a bell?”

“It’s Jennifer’s,” Steve says, and Henry kicks himself for not knowing. Suzy would know. Suzy knows everything. But Steve is already miles ahead.

“The Hawthorne’s keep their names,” he says. “It’s a witch thing—and their kids do, too. And we’re trying now, for a kid, so I thought, might be nice, you know. To share a name with Jenny and our kids. Not that I don’t love sharing a name with Elvis and Verity. I love them to bits. But there’s just something about Darling, now, you know? Like it belongs to Suzy. And she belongs to you, so...”

“Yeah,” Henry says, stunned, and then “—no. She doesn’t belong to me or you. She’s a fucking force of nature, our Suze.”

“Yeah,” Steve says with a little huff of a laugh. “Well, she stole my name, and brought you back to life, so I reckon you can have it, you know, if you want.”

“Have what?”

“My name. Darling. It could be yours—as a stage name or whatever—if you want it.”

Henry’s eyes nearly bug out of his head, but he bites his tongue and thinks. Really thinks. About Suzy and Verity and Elvis and Mackenzie. Darlings, all. His Darlings.

 _Henry Darling_ , he thinks. _You gotta admit, it’s got a ring_. And speaking of rings…

“I’m going to propose soon,” he tells Steve. “Not that we can get married, legally, right—on account of all the paperwork I don’t have—but we can still celebrate, yeah? I mean she’s the love of my fucking life—both of them. And that matters, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Steve says, cuffing him on the arm—a little too hard but still just right. “Yeah, it matters.”

“Henry,” says the publican, “you’re up.”

“Right,” Henry says and claps Steve on the shoulder while he drains the last of his pint. He’s got a new guitar tonight—an old, new guitar. Suzy had Zach track his old baby down—the acoustic one no one ever cared about in his first life—and it fits into his hands like it was built for them, which, of course, it was.

“Hello Sydney,” he says to the crowd. There are about twenty folks in tonight. Not his biggest audience to be sure, but not his smallest either. And somewhere out there in the night, his family is waiting to welcome him home, all over again.

“I’m Henry Darling,” he says, “and this one is for my wife, Suze.”

**Author's Note:**

> It happened again. If you found this one, thank you again for reading!
> 
> Title from the Talking Heads


End file.
